AWS c7g.mediumvsAWS c7g.metal

c7g.medium pairs 1 vCPUs with 2GB of RAM at $0.0363/hr On-Demand (about $26/mo at 24×7). c7g.metal pairs 64 vCPUs with 128GB at $2.3200/hr (~$1670/mo). c7g.medium is 6291% cheaper per hour than c7g.metal ($2.2837/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **c7g family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (AWS Graviton (ARM64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: c7g.medium gives you 1 vCPUs and 2GB of RAM, c7g.metal gives you 64 vCPUs and 128GB. AWS scales pricing close to linearly within a family, so picking the right size is mostly about right-sizing your workload, not getting a better deal per vCPU.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are c7g.medium delivers ~5928% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (78540 vs 1303 points per $1/hr). That's the cleanest signal we have for "which one runs your workload faster per dollar," but it only matters if your workload is single-thread-bound; for parallel workloads the multi-core scores (2767 vs 192830) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when c7g.medium drops to $0.0087/hr and c7g.metal drops to $0.6209/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick c7g.medium when your workload is closer to compute-optimized (CPU-bound work — batch processing, web servers under sustained load, game servers). Pick c7g.metal when it's closer to compute-optimized (CPU-bound work — batch processing, web servers under sustained load, game servers). When neither side is obviously right, the cheaper hourly rate usually wins for fault-tolerant batch workloads, while the higher single-core score usually wins for latency-sensitive web traffic. The regional pricing tables linked from each instance page below show where each is currently cheapest — sometimes a >20% regional gap flips the comparison entirely.